As the whole world goes mobile (2,600% increase predicted by 2015), two main options have emerged for bringing your business to the party: build apps or optimize your website.

I want to focus on the second option, optimizing your website/HTML, which is becoming a more appealing option as HTML becomes more capable of doing the things we’ve typically needed apps to do.

Once HTML 5 can do anything an app can, I see only three major advantages to building an app:

• Push notifications (a common app feature that currently doesn’t work in HTML)

• Distribution (selling/downloading an app that lives on a phone versus saving a bookmark)

• Offline access (HTML 5 is already pushing this one off the list as it has built-in offline caching features)

Apps also still have a “cool” factor, but typically introduce more time and cost in development and maintenance.

A number of terms have emerged to describe Web optimization for mobile devices. I’m here to tell you they all essentially mean the same thing: delivering a reduced amount of content to your users in a logical fashion to create a more efficient mobile experience. Ideally your website will detect the user’s device and optimize it on the fly since there are so many different mobile devices and screen sizes.

• Mobile Optimize
• Mobile Format
• Mobile Template
• Mobile Versioning
• Multi-Siting
• Adaptive Content Rendering

I think “optimize” is the most logical and accurate. Whatever you want to call it, the effort is partly technical, but largely falls in the realm of content strategy. With less screen real estate to use for your message, you’ll need to make careful decisions about what’s most important to convey to your user.

Come to think of it, brevity might just not be such a bad thing for the future of digital content delivery.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Uncategorized

Have you ever painted a room to find that the color looks dated just a few months later? Or have you ever tried to put together a spring look, something fresh and bursting with color and just a twist of sophistication, but when you put all your pieces and accessories together you looked like a kid’s carnival ride instead?

I LOVE color, but I’m not always awesome at pulling together a pallet that evokes the response I’m looking for. I’ve been so daunted by the need to pick color before, that I’ve abandoned projects (and outfits) over it. This is why I am SO excited to find Colourlovers.com (Note: that’s colour with the British “o-u-r“ spelling).

In this online community, people with a real passion and talent for color put together hundreds of pallets and patterns for you to browse through and give them fun names like ”Valiant“ or ”Viking Invasion“ or ”Lovers Cry at Movies“. They even have a Business section that is specifically colors that are trending in the corporate world.

They also take images of objects from trending websites and pull color pallets right from the images.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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I definitely would encourage you to check it out! It’s very inspirational!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: How To, Marketing, Web

We have a double feature for you lucky viewers this Friday! Here we have TWO staff meeting videos for you to enjoy. The first, we were able to do a successful update on the third quarter figures and activity. Unfortunately, we had a bit of an issue with mixing our metaphors.

Then the changes to Facebook happened. Let’s just say we had one staff member who didn’t take it very well.

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: Fun

I have never been able to get into Digg or any of the other sharable interest-tracking type tools. This weekend I heard Pinterest mentioned to me at least 8 times so I figured I finally needed to check it out. What a FANTASTIC tool!

Pinterest is a service that allows you to create online “Pinboards” for things you are interested in. Looking for new curtains for your living room? Create a “Living Room Curtains” pinboard and each time you find one you like, “Pin it” from an easy button you can drag and drop into your browser tool bar. Afterwards you can go back to your board to view everything you pinned, make your final choice and follow the photo back to the original page.

When you create an account you can easily find your Facebook and/or Twitter friends and identify categories of stuff you are interested in (DIY/Crafts, Home Decor, Photography, etc.) and you will see the pins from prominent pinners in these categories.

This is a very easy site to use. I suggest you request an invite today! You will be glad you did!

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Katie Hawkey Categories: Fun, Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Web

They’re called The Tea Party, and have nothing to do with the recent movement in American politics.  Having been around for over 20 years, they are a little dismayed at the constant confusion their name now causes.  However, there is one bright spot for the now unfortunately named band.  They own the domain name teaparty.com.

And they are considering selling that domain, especially since it is valued at around 1 million US dollars.  It’s hard to let that kind of money go, even if your politics don’t jive with who’s giving you the money.  As is apparently the case with The Tea Party.  They say that the option to sell it to the highest bidder is definitely on the table, but that they’re holding off until after their upcoming world tour.  If they pull in enough money there, the band says they would accept less than $1 million, from someone like John Stewart or Stephen Colbert.

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Andrew Crowe Categories: Fun, Web

SoundCloud is a new stomping ground for sharing all things aural: music, podcasts &  all other types of digital sound. It began small and was a quick hit with independent musicians (a.k.a. artists without a label), but it has begun to explode into all areas of recorded and digital sound.

What makes it different from iTunes and other similar sites? It uses a blog-type format for posting your tracks which means:

• You can tag a track with various keywords (making it more easily found by googling around)
• You can comment on other people’s tracks and respond to other’s comments (you can also turn off commenting if you’d like)
• You can embed various types of widgets into your webpages (all customizable! – see below)

• You have a built in RSS Feed so listeners can subscribe and automatically download new tracks
• You can also create specified RSS Feeds which include only tracks fitting your parameters (e.g.- If you record a lot of music, but want a separate RSS Feed just for the Christmas Carols you recorded, you can set your RSS to only grab tracks with the tag “Christmas”)

Other super cool features allow you to:

• Add your own comments into your track at any point (to highlight or explain a section of the piece)
• Group together tracks into sets (organizing like tracks together so listeners don’t have to search too far for similar tracks)
• Mark tracks as favorites (directing listeners to the tracks you are most proud of)
• Connect your posts to your social media pages and accounts (posting new tracks to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts automatically)
• Connect to your followers/listeners and comment on their work (using a very Twitter-like system)

• And much much more!

Perhaps the COOLEST feature of SoundCloud is their tripped out analytics! SoundCloud analytics, or as they call it- “stats”, pulls together data not only from your SoundCloud page, but also from all your embedded widgets and links you’ve posted anywhere else on the internet. It takes all this data and tells you exactly how many people are listening to each of your tracks over a specified period of time. It also tracks traffic patterns so you can see if general traffic is up or down from month to month.

But my favorite part of SoundCloud Analytics is the big map showing you were your listeners are from (I am such a sucker for visuals). How cool is that?!

The most basic version of SoundCloud is free to sign up for, and you may more depending on how much space you need for your tracks. None of the pricing is too crazy, and the ROI is definitely worth it.

Astek has been testing the new Beta version of SoundCloud and there are some even more awesome changes on the horizon- not the least of which is the improved integration with iTunes.

For now, keep your eye on SoundCloud- I think they are going to be a major player in reshaping the digital music industry. And if you have a podcast or have music to share, give the trial a go – I think you’ll be really impressed.

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Sara Gorsky Categories: General

I checked in to Walgreens on Foursquare recently (yes I’m crazy like that), and noticed the first mostly altruistic business special I’ve seen to date. They are giving way a flu shot voucher to someone in need for every person who checks in.

I showed it to the pharmacists asking if I needed to do anything else. They exchanged inquisitive looks, but confirmed that they had fulfilled flu shots for a few people bringing in certificates from this program.

A bit more explanation on how to fulfill this would have helped, but I applaud Walgreens for leveraging Foursquare for social good.

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Andy Swindler Categories: Uncategorized

In April of last year Steve Jobs published an open-letter on Apple’s website explaining why Adobe’s Flash technology cannot run (by design) on Apple’s iOS devices (iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone.)

Flash has become an inseparable part of the Web as experienced on desktop computers, achieving almost complete saturation (99% by Adobe’s own accounts) and, until recently, it’s been the most frequently utilized technology for playing back video and producing animated content including ad-banners and web-based games.  The reasons that Jobs gave for excluding Flash boil down to the fact that Apple keeps a famously tight-control of the user experience on their products and Flash takes that control out of their hands.  Flash is: 100% proprietary, a band-width/battery/system resource hog and notoriously insecure.  Jobs also points out that Flash is simply not as essential as it once was given that most video on the web is available now in open-source and HTML5 compatible formats like H.264.

Last week Adobe proved that they still capable of adapting with the release of Flash Media Server (FMS) 4.5.  FMS has traditionally been used to stream video to Flash-based media players but as of version 4.5 the Media Server is now also able to target protocols compatible with Apple.

This just covers video, interactive content still isn’t supported, but it’s a step forward.

Exit question: How much does Flash still matter these days?  Does any part of your web-presence still rely on it?

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Tom Hickey Categories: Gadget, Technology

If you have a website, there is a very good chance that you track your activity via Google Analytics. As Astek is an agency, we track not only our web activities via Google Analytics, but also the activities on many of our clients’ sites and blogs. I was at a brainstorming session with a client and their PR agency, when the client asked how many hits their sites receive from mobile devices. Let me tell you, I was extremely relieved to have an analytic app downloaded and set up on my iPad to bring out and show our client!

I have downloaded the Analytics for iPad app (available both for free and paid premium). It’s fantastic for accessing your information and data on the go, and the Dashboard functionality works wonderfully if your Google Analytics account manages multiple sites. You also can add additional accounts besides your own – again, very useful if you are an agency.

The reviews are mixed, but I have had nothing but great experience with it. I’m still using the free version, but the HD version of the app receives mostly all positive reviews. One reason I may upgrade, is that you can send PDF and Excel reports to yourself, your team and clients directly from the app. Not too shabby!

We also use the Sprout Social social analytic tool, which does incorporate Google Analytics per client. However it is nice to have the specific Analytics app that covers all clients. Do you have an analytic app that you prefer? Share in the comments!

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Rachel Yeomans Categories: google, Technology